


Don't leave me high and dry

by de_Clare



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies), Pirates of the Caribbean RPF
Genre: Anxiety Attacks, Drug Use, M/M, Marijuana, Unrequited Love, bad trip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-18 19:03:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13687863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/de_Clare/pseuds/de_Clare
Summary: Neurotic with unrequited love and years of no-strings-attached sex, Jack invites Johnny to smoke cannabis with him.





	1. Chapter 1

Johnny’s a cinderblock kinda guy…No, that’s a terrible metaphor. What’s a good metaphor for being soft on the outside and hard on the inside? Burnt fish sticks?—Nah, that’s cold on the inside, black and flaky on the outside and Johnny’s neither flaky nor black. And Johnny’s not cold. When he asks you how you’re doing, he means it—Seriously! If you say  _fine_ , Johnny’ll say, “No. Hair is fine. Art  _can_  be fine. There is a  _fine_  line between rebellion and patriotism. But a person is not fine.”  
  
Johnny’s more like a…safe. A big, polished titanium safe that’s finely-wrought in and of itself, but you’re itching to unlock it and poke around its secrets. Jack’s pressed his ear to the loc and strained to hear the keypad clicking of the tumbler, but he can’t quite suss-out the correct configuration to open him up. He’s excited and terrified about what he’ll find, and just plain terrified of what he won’t. That’s the problem with safes like that—something that elaborately fortified certainly looks like it contains something remarkable, but it’s just as easily empty.  
  
Johnny’s no birthday present. No Easter egg. No lottery ticket—you can’t just scratch and see what’s underneath.   
  
Maybe that’s why women (and men, Jack reflects) are so drawn to him. He doesn’t immediately present himself. You’ve always got the feeling that he’s concealing something immense—probably with major sexual implications. And it’s that ever-present sense of waiting and wanting and wondering and mulling over the many multitudinous multiplicity of possibilities that creates that wonderful tension that really is the root of all desire. Infinite desire is never knowing the depths of someone.  
  
People are poems. You read ‘em and read ‘em and you pick out insights by the stem, like cherries, but you can’t whittle down a whole poem (or person) into something conceptually manageable. If you have, you’ve either stereotyped or they’re painfully shallow.  
  
But Johnny, oh man, you wanna call him enigmatic but it sounds painfully “Entertainment Tonight.”  
  
He’s just confident and intense and focused and it’s no wonder that this is often mistaken for detachment. And you think that if you can focus that intensity on yourself, if even for a second, you’ll carbonize. He’ll melt your matter back into its primordial energy. [And if E=MC^2 and the speed of light is an improbably large number…so the speed of light  _squared_  must be im- _fucking_ -possibly huge. Imagine the energy bustling in your atoms. Well, you figure there’s an H-bomb in every two neutrinos, so that amounts to…enough force to blast all the matter in the universe back into nebular clouds of gas and dust  _literally_  packed into your little finger. That’s what Johnny’ll do to you. The trick is turning that powerful beam onto yourself, because Johnny’s loathe to turn it onto people.   
  
That’s why Jack wants to ask Johnny if he would smoke some cannabis with him.  
  
You see, Jack and Johnny have been fucking on and off since 2002, and Johnny’s satisfied with having a close friendship jazzed-up with sporadic sexual encounters between strange motel sheets, scratchy, stiff-starched and bleach-scented. And of course he thinks that Jack’s OK with it, because Jack would never own up to loving him—then he’d just come off as gay. And he can’t tell him that he wants this to be “something more”—then he’ll sound like some clichéd, bent-up other-woman who’s miffed because her midnight, dirty-martini sugar daddy has been promising to divorce his wife for two years and  _why won’t you hold hands with me in public?_  No. Part of love is respect, so Jack respects Johnny’s inclination to keep this all simple and unentangled.  
  
That being said, Jack believes that some psychotropic drugs might shuffle Johnny loose from his emotional reserve. Maybe it will reveal that Johnny’s emotions correspond to his own…or maybe it will just reveal a sharp, rusty Occam’s razor. [The most likely explanation is the simplest explanation—Johnny hasn’t displayed these feelings because he does not entertain such feelings for him. Jack’s greatest fear—the door swings open and gaping emptiness, like a gaping maw. [Again with that damn safe metaphor!]   
  
Ah well, even if it does confirm Jack’s gravest fears, at least it would be gratifying to see Johnny’s well-schooled demeanor soften into giggles. Maybe Jack wouldn’t be so intimidated by him afterward.  
  
Jack hasn’t smoked before. Well, he hasn’t smoked  _cannabis_  before, but everyone does it. A university friend described it as, “like being drunk, except you can drive.” [And this is not the part where Jack moralizes that statement by saying that  _ironically_ , that friend died when he ran into a lorry on the motorway. It was actually a  _parked_  lorry in front of a Tesco and the bloke was completely sober. And he doesn’t have a death certificate, just a six-month driving ban.]  
  
Sure, Jack has his reservations. After all, cannabis is schedule-one in the United States, meaning that it is illicit and of no medicinal or therapeutic utility [ridiculous Puritan prejudices if you ask him, but that’s what happens when evangelical logic dictates that a generous interpretation on a single Old Testament “your body is a temple” assertion supercedes the needs of chemotherapy patients and glaucoma sufferers. Thus neglecting all edicts to care for the sick as well as all of those niggling charity and “love thy neighbor” clauses…but that’s another week-long, discursive rant for which Jack is currently taking Welbutrin] but he has made up his mind on the matter. He just hopes that Johnny will agree.  
  
Everyone knows that Johnny smokes cannabis, but no one talks about it, especially not Johnny. It makes sense, Jack supposes. After all, possession could land him in legal trouble, and he has his family to consider, not to mention his reputation. Everyone knows that misdemeanor marijuana possession spirals into “checks into rehab after month-long crack bender” according to the tabloid headlines.  
  
Regardless, Jack’s resolved on the issue. Come Hell or high water…well, maybe he’d clear out for Hell, should it decide to come. High water, well, he could float on that.  
  
The female interns have perked-up, like she-wolves downwind from a bleeding moose—Johnny must have just arrived.  
  
Jack jogs outside to the parking lot, where Johnny is busy locking his battered green Jeep and the sight of him finally rams home the immensity of what he’s asking and the fact that in all likelihood he’ll answer with an emphatic “No”—Jack isn’t even sure that Johnny smokes cannabis. Again, Occam’s razor, its screeching steel voice whispering, “He doesn’t talk about it because he probably doesn’t do it.”   
  
What if he doesn’t? What if he has strong moral convictions against it? What if he’s offended that Jack has presumed so, and assumes that he’s some kind of drug-addicted moral degenerate? He’d lose what little zygotic relationship that has developed between them. But if he doesn’t asks, he knows he won’t catch a wink of sleep for weeks, torturing himself over what may have transpired had he not been such a craven prat. That’s the problem with neuroses—if he asks, he’s sure he’s going to be rejected; if he doesn’t, then of course Johnny would have accepted and revealed his hidden, profound love for Jack.  
  
Johnny catches sight of him, and suddenly Jack’s stomach is twisted in knots and swollen in his throat.  
  
“ _HEY_ ,” high-pitched. H sounds like he just sat on his balls.  
  
“What?” Jack’s nervous squeak must have been of a frequency that only dolphins can hear.  
  
“Hi. Johnny. How—are you?”  _Damn._  
  
“Honestly, man? Terrible. Alzheimer’s finally took Grandma Jane. She was really an amazing woman.”  
  
“Oh.”  _Think of a segue way, genius._  “Erm, that’s unfortunate…But, whenever I’m, er, bereaved I smoke some cannabis. Makes me feel loads better.”  
  
“Really? You know, drugs don’t make the grief go away, they just post-pone it. If you think you’ve got a problem, I know people who’ve really turned their lives around in twelve-step programs. I’ve got the num—“  
  
“—No!,” he pipes, a little desperately. He’s so nervous he probably sounds like an addict. If he says that he doesn’t have a problem, well, denial’s the first step to admitting you have a problem. And if he says he has a problem, then he has a problem. There’s really no way out in this situation. “I didn’t mean it that way. I meant that, er, I don’t smoke cannabis to  _escape_  because grieving…it’s a process. And, like you said, I’d just be post-poning it. It’s just that if I smoke some cannabis, with a good friend,” he gestures to Johnny “it reminds me to appreciate those who are still here. You know?”  
  
“Um, not really, but whatever works for you. I don’t judge. Just watch out for yourself, all right?”  
  
“Oh. Yes. Completely.”  
  
Johnny nods, and starts walking to the gate. Panicked, Jack grabs Johnny’s arm.  
  
He jerks away. “Hey man, what’s your problem today?”  
  
“N-n-nothing. I just—“ he breathes, hoping perhaps to exhale some of the tension in his throat.  
  
“I was wondering if you’d, erm, mind smoking with me after shooting today?”  
  
Johnny doesn’t say a word, just looks at him like Jack’s a puppy who keeps shitting on the carpet. “Jesus, is that why you’re so agitated?”  
  
Jack nods. It’s all he can do. His mouth’s cotton-dry and his tongue’s clay.  
  
Johnny relaxes visibly. He knows about Jack’s anxious tendencies—Not that he always forgives him for them. “Sure, I guess. But I’ve only got a half pack of Marlboros, and those are gonna be gone by the time we rap, but if you can find someone who’ll bum you one…”  
  
“No, I didn’t mean—“ he looks around, lowering his voice to a raspy whisper, “ _cigarettes_.” He’s dropped the bomb. This’ll make a mess of his head when it blows up in his face.  
  
Johnny laughs. Not hard. It’s a laugh rooted in a rather absurd realization rather than mirth. “Man, you can be such a head-case sometimes. Have you been hitting the expresso shots again?”   
  
“Yeah,” Jack affects abashedness. He’s never had expresso shots in his life.  
  
“Well?”  
  
“Let me think about it. I’ll get back to you later today, all right?”  
  
“All right.”  _(Not at) all right._  
  
Jack leans forward, lips first. He needs this. Something to remind him that he may be inept as a person, but he can still make Johnny come. The way Johnny acts outside of motel rooms makes that easy to forget.  
  
Roughly, Johnny stabs his hand between them.  
  
“Not here.”  
  
“Yeah.” An 18-wheeler roars past, drowning out the sound of Jack shattering. “I understand.”  
  
“Hey Irma,” Johnny greets the grim-faced security woman, with the wiry black hair and sagging jowls. She smiles, jowls wobbling giddily and waves Johnny through.  
  
Jack moves to follow, but she blocks him bodily, smile wiped clean away. “ID,” she demands.  
  
[+]  
  
Eight hours and Jack has recited the same two lines in as many different inflections, emphases and phrasings as his range allows—he even tried his hand at differing affectations.  
  
“Hey Gore, why don’t I try a different accent? Check my résumé. I can do American—Southern, Western, Southwester, New York and even Boston. Paak the caar in Haarvaard Yaard. Or maybe something more exotic. South African. No, I’ve got it—New Zealand!—I can play this one as Peter Jackson. ‘Oi, before I directed Lord of the Rings I made a movie where I vomited in a bowl and aliens ate it. And don’t get me started on my movie where puppets had a gun battle with AK-47s.”  
  
“Cut. OK, that’s enough. But if I can’t find a satisfactory take, we’re doing this tomorrow.”  
  
“Thank you, commandant.”  
  
Jack’s done for the day, but Johnny hasn’t approached him to render his decision. Maybe he’s avoiding him. Maybe he’ll always avoid him. Maybe he’s revoking the modicum of intimacy he shares with him [And it’s little consolation that he’ll be filming with him for months, knowing that off-camera, Jack is a non-entity in his eyes.] And Jack has no recourse. It’s not like Johnny owes him anything. What’s he going to say?  _I sucked your cock, so you owe my feelings some consideration!_. Their exchanges are limited to bedroom etiquette. Jack sucks off Johnny; Johnny wanks Jack. Jacks sucks Johnny’s cock mind-blowingly (and Johnny feels generous); Johnny lets Jack fuck him. But all debts are cleared by morning. Non-transferable, especially to emotional currency. These are strictly back-room negotiations—savvy?  
  
Jack hurries to the costume trailer, praying to any God who still has sympathy for his sinful arse for Johnny to still be there.  
  
He climbs in, peeking under the stalls. [Yes, stalls. A major drawback to shooting in a hangar rather than a studio. You’re relegated to changing in a hot, cramped trailer in what’s essentially a bathroom stall.] At the end of the row, he spies a pair of sun-darkened feet with y-shaped sandal tan-lines. He moves closer to check under the door—  
  
“Jack?”  
  
*Thunk*  
  
“Damn it!” He grabs his throbbing head, hissing.  
  
“You OK?” a disembodies voice asks disinterestedly from behind the door.  
  
“Yep,” Jack grunts through clenched teeth, “Never better—I was just…I was wondering if you’ve come to a decision?”  
  
“Regarding what?”  
  
“The, er, smoking…cannabis. Smoking cannabis.”  
  
“Oh yeah. Thanks for reminding me.” Jack desperately wishes he could see Johnny’s face, because the tiptoe-flexing of feet is no indication of what Johnny thinks about the whole thing. Then again, Johnny’s face is never much of a give-away either.  
  
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”  
  
“Wh- _at_?” his voice cracks in the middle. Well, for normal people marijuana is mellowing and mildly psychoactive, but for people with panic disorders, depression and anxious tendencies, it can literally be a trip to hell. And as a friend, I wouldn’t recommend that you try it.”  
  
“But I’ve smoked hundreds of times. A-and I was just fine. Had a laugh. Ate some chocolate biscuits.” Jack is thankful that Johnny can’t see his lying face. When Johnny looks at him, he feels thin as cellophane and just as transparent. Johnny doesn’t look at you. He looks into you.  
  
Johnny steps out in his own clothes, but with the dark vestiges of Jack Sparrow make-up smeared around his eyes. God, Jack wants to fuck him. [No—Jack wants to be tied to the bed post of a massive four-poster with black, silken sheets in a castle with a lightning storms raging and rain smacking against the window and Johnny with those demon-dark eyes whispering, “May darkness take you—hard, with impunity.”  
  
“You sure? Because I’ll admit, babysitting you when you freak-out is low on my list of things to do today.”  
  
“I’ve never freaked out.” “…on cannabis,” he amends. Which is the truth. But seeing as though this is only because he’s never actually smoked it makes his statement misleading at best.  
  
“What time is it?”  
  
Jack checks his mobile, “Four.”  
  
Johnny considers, but seems a bit apprehensive, as if something’s still nagging at him. “We can smoke at my house. The kids are at their grandma’s right now, but Vanessa’s going to be home at eleven, so you’re going to have to sober up before that.”  
  
Johnny’s house? Jack’s never seen Johnny’s house. They’ve only ever met in neutral places. Bars. Motels. Entering and leaving a full half-hour apart. Jack has memorized how to say “Do Not Disturb” is five languages just by reading the sign on the door. It’s more than he could have rightfully expected, but he pushes his luck a bit further.  
  
“Can’t I just crash for the night? I mean, you’ve got that massive mansion in Brentwood—surely you can spare a room.”  
  
“Space isn’t the issue man, you know that. Look, if we’re going to maintain our arrangement we’ve got to be careful. That’s why I don’t bring you up to Vanessa, and so far she doesn’t seem to suspect anything, or at least she’s not showing me that she is. But if she saw us together that might just be what triggers her suspicions.”  
  
“I understand,”  _that you don’t want to admit that you’re a faggot_.  
  
“I knew you would. Anyway, you know how to get there, right?”  
  
“No. I’ve yet to have that pleasure.”  
  
“Ok. Just come out when you’re done and follow me.”  
  
Jack has that absurd urge to kiss him again, but it would only piss Johnny off. Anyone oculd walk into this trailer at any time, and any grip with a camera phone could turn a handsome profit on their stolen moment. Jack’s got nothing to lose. He’s nobody. But Johnny has a lot at stake. If the pictures hit the tabloids, every grocery counter in the world would be lined with the cover story, “Johnny Depp caught in GAY affair with unknown lover.” Jack doesn’t want to be responsible for that.  
  
“Be right out.”  
  
[+]  
  
Johnny is impossible to follow. Traffic on the 14 is spotty because people are suddenly slowing down to catch a glimpse of the various brush fires lining dotting the horizon, so Johnny darts back and forth across all four lanes, never releasing the accelerator by a millimeter, holding steady at 75 when the rest of the freeway is crawling along at about 50. Jack, who would be perfectly content to hug the right lane and ride the current of cars to his destination, is forced to careen through daredevil maneuvers just to keep up, always keeping that forest green Jeep in sight.  
  
What’s worst is when the people around Johnny realize that they’re driving beside Johnny- _fucking_ -Depp, so they slam the brakes to stay level, creating a bright, braked-lighted column of cars that is impenetrable by Jack’s hulking Escalade. Why did he buy this thing? He’s in Los Angeles, where there’s not an iota of unpaved space and he’s driving a Humvee assault vehicle.   
  
The theory was that in the event of an accident, the bloke in the bigger car lives. So he bought an ostentatiously big car so that the energy-conscious bloke in the Prius eats it instead of him.  
  
His heart’s thumping like a bass drum-roll. High-risk driving. High-risk fucking. Johnny loves living on the edge. But he’s always ALWAYS in control.   
  
Jack struggles to keep pace.


	2. Chapter 2

“Je vous accueille chez Paradis et Depp. Voulez-vous une boisson? Puis-je prendre votre manteau?”  
Welcome to the Depp-Paradis houseshold. Would you like a drink? May I take your coat? 

“Non merci et non—je ne porte pas de manteau. Nous sommes en Californie alors il fait toujours chaud. Il y a deux saisons ici—l’été et Noël. Mais je voudrais fumer du…pot.”  
No thank you and no—I am not wearing a coat. We’re in California, so it’s always hot. There are two seasons here—summer and Christmas. But—I would like to smoke some …pot.

“Du pot? Comment fumeriez-vous un pot?”  
Pot? How would you smoke a pot?

“Dans une pipe.”  
In a pipe.

“Une pipe ? Un pot ne pourrait pas entrer dans une pipe.”  
A pipe? A pot wouldn’t fit in a pipe.

Un pot ne pourrait pas entrer dans une pipe.”  
But a pipe would fit into a pot.

“Vous êtes fous.”  
You are insane.

“Tu es beau. Je veux que tu viennes dans ma gorge, puis dans mon cul.”  
You are beautiful. I want you to come down my throat and then into my ass.

“Venir?”  
To come?

“Oui, venir...it means ‘to come’, n’est-ce pas?”  
Yes, to come…it means ‘to come’, does it not?

“Yes, as in ‘I came from the grocery store’, or ‘please come to my humble abode.’ But you just said, ‘I want you to come down my throat’ as in you want me to come a-walking down your throat. I don’t think I’d fit.”

Jack thinks of a quip to the tune of ‘well you’re already so practiced at jumping down my throat, so it shouldn’t be such a traumatizing transition’ but that would:  
1\. be counter-productive  
2\. be a petulant over-simplification. Jack often feels like Johnny’s criticizing him, but he conveys his disapproval far more subtly—head-shakes and sighs rather than telling-offs and shouts. Somehow, Jack would prefer the latter. At least when someone yells at you, you know that they’re expelling all of their anger in the moment, but when they just sigh and ignore you, you wonder if they’re just storing it away in an ever-accumulating mass of resentment that one day is going to amount to something weightier than the “pros” of remaining in the relationship. God, Jack wishes Johnny would jump down his throat more often.

Instead, he settles on a wry smile and a, “Well, that’s never been a problem,” with a pointed glance at Johnny’s crotch.

“You speak French in that perfect Parisian accent. Let me guess, learned it at some fancy all-boys boarding school where you wore pin-stripes and engaged in group masturbation.”

Jack isn’t quite sure if Johnny missed the insinuation or is just neatly ignoring it. “Hey, I was engaging in a time-honoured English tradition. It would have been unpatriotic not to. And anyway, it made it easier to play a navy bloke.”

“Rum, sodomy and the lash?”

“Exactly…Erm, are we going to move beyond the doorway?”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry man.”

“No problem.” Johnny leads Jack to the living room, or is it the den…Jack’s never quite known the difference. Well, at any rate it’s large and positively reeks of Vanessa’s chintzy decorating tastes. Louis XIV—yuck! The kind of extravagant interior decorating that reminds you why his grandson lost everything from the neck up. Purple velvet plush chairs decorated in the chestnut arms with hand-carven faeries, pans and all of that ostentatious Greek mythological crap. Oh look, it’s Zeus—Vanessa, did you know that he raped a woman whilst in the form of a swan?

A six-armed, gilded chandelier. A grandfather clock [how did it get that name, anyway? Invented by the fine Swiss engineer Jacques Grandfather? Used to store grandfathers before the advent of retirement homes (could a grandfather fit in there…well, old people are quite small), so that families could dust them off every year at Christmas and have them put the kids to sleep with stories about growing up in the old country—and every year he was even more economically disadvantaged. We didn’t have these newfangled circulatory systems when I was growing up. We had to hand-pump our own blood with bicycle pumps. Sphygmomanometers? Ha! We used tire pressure gauges and we were grateful for it.…]

Ok, that was a touch over-the-top. No, not the grandfather thing, the furniture.

Marble covered tables. Terra-cotta urns. Why they hell does she need urns? Unless Vanessa’s got the carbonized remains of what was once a loved-one in there, then she doesn’t need a goddamned urn in her living room. They’re so…superfluous! [But God Jack must be more of a poufter than he’d previously imagined, because he can now recognize ‘terra cotta’ as a colour.]

And tapestries!—Jack had been expecting a few ostentatious, baroque oil-on-canvasses, but God can does this exceed his (admittedly low) expectations. You can’t tack a blanket to the wall and call it stylish. You know, there have been some marvelous innovations in picture mediums since the fourteenth century, such as…Oh, I don’t know—try PHOTOGRAPHS!

“Something wrong?” Jack realizes that he’s worked up a sweat abusing the furniture.

“Yeah. Fine. Just admiring the décor.”

“Well thanks, I picked it out myself. Since we’re almost never here, Vanessa gave me free reign. She said it’s fine because she won’t have to ‘long endure my tawdry taste in interior decorating.’”

Johnny settles onto the couch—the upholstered, white, gilt, varnished baroque couch. He runs a hand through his long, gold-flecked, sweat-slick hair. Jack knows better than to mistake that for vulnerability. Still, he takes his opportunities where he finds them…like a scavenger. Scavenging for Johnny’s affection. Because fucking isn’t affection. It’s fucking.

He settles down beside Johnny, “Tired?” his hand crawls onto Johnny’s knee, like an icy-white crab.

“Yeah, Gore ran me ragged with the fencing sequence.” He doesn’t acknowledge the hand, and Jack is aching for an indication one way or another.

“Wait, wait—fencing? As in, proper fencing?”

“Uh, yeah. Haven’t you read the script?”

“They only give me my scenes…which are few.”

“That’s what happens when you’re going to die.”

“Die?”

“You haven’t heard? Oh man, sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Look on the bright side—at least you get to do a death scene.”

Jack’s looks at the floor with a stomach-churning sense of vertigo. They’re killing him? Does this mean he’ll be finished early? What if his scenes will be done by next week’s end? This is the last film (a blessing and a curse)—when will he see Johnny next? Not at the Oscars. Jack wouldn’t even get a People’s Choice award nomination. [Sad because People’s Choice awards are only one intellectual step above the ‘World’s Greatest Grandpa’ award—if that was even a real award.}

“Why the bloody fucking hell didn’t Gore tell me?” His jugular is jumping out of his neck. 

“Whoa, Jack, I’m fucking with you.”

“Oh.” He slams the brakes on his panic attack, screeching resonating in his chest. “I was just, er, afraid that, erm, they’d cut my paycheck.”

“Dude, that’s absurd. Disney couldn’t change what’s in the contract.”

“I know. I…” The fight-or-flight reaction has drained the blood from Jack’s higher reasoning faculties, and he’s just too parched of words to salvage this one. “Let’s just smoke, eh?”

“I’ll tell you again, I don’t think you should do this.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Hey, that’s not just for you. I really don’t want my buzz to be blown by trip-sitting. And not to mention, I’m going to be high as a kite and I can’t promise that I can protect you from yourself.”

Fight-or-flight—Jacks feels like he could kill a wild boar with a stick and a rock, but he really can’t deal with a cross-examination from Johnny. 

So he fucking kisses him—kissing so hard its fucking, smothering Johnny’s mouth so fierce that their teeth crash like snow-white train cars derailed and his stubble’s probably making a mess of Johnny’s face and neck but he doesn’t care—he just doesn’t care, and he forces his sweaty hand between jeans and lily-white ass cheeks thinking about how bad he wants to paint this hideous, French-upholstered couch with come—on both sides of the cushions so Johnny can’t just turn them over and that’s fucking that—and Jack’ll come into him with a force that you have to measure in megatons, and when this ugly fucking living room’s a smoking crater under a mushroom cloud yawning toward God he’ll anoint Johnny’s forehead with his semen and where the fuck is his mind and why the fuck is it so fucking beautiful that his cock could weep!?

Two hands. On his shoulders. Pushing. And Johnny’s rigid as plywood in his arms. “Whoa, hey. Hey. You’ve got to come down by 10:30, so if you want to smoke, we can’t waste time like this.”

If Jack hadn’t seen otherwise, he’d assume that Johnny had no balls. Though Jack hasn’t personally fondled Johnny’s heart in his palm, so maybe he just lacks one of those. Well, he hears the implied out. Johnny’ll let Jack fuck him, but then they can’t smoke. Eye on the prize.He can fuck around with Johnny, but what’ll he accomplish—a five-second muscle spasm and come trickling out of his anus like a leaky faucet for days. But if this will pry Johnny open, if only for a second…he just wants to know what Johnny feels—if he feels. Even if Jack can’t prize that from his clenched fists, then at least he’ll have a moment where he knows that Johnny isn’t brick-walling him out. Reluctantly, he falls back, feeling like he’s had a cold bucket of water thrown over his head. “All right. Let’s do it.”

“OK.” 

Johnny slides open the drawer of one of those infuriating marble-topped tables, and a fat bulge of dry, green leaves pops up, like the quivering fur of a trapped animal. Well, an animal in a ziplock bag.

“Oh my God!” Jack’s a little startled that Johnny keeps it right there and in such felonious quantities. That quantity surely merits, “possession with intent to sell.” All of a sudden he’s nervous about being in the same room as it and its potential (extensive) criminal consequences.

Johnny smiles, apparently amused at Jack’s shock. “Don’t worry, it won’t bite you. This here is a full O.”

“O?”

“Ounce.”

“Ah.” It looks like a metric ton.

Johnny reaches into the shadowy depths of the drawer and draws out a bulging, emerald green, velvet pouch. He fishes out something that Jack recognizes and something he does not. The first is a tobacco pipe, that’s certain, but the other one is apparently a pipe, except it’s made of glass, looks as if a four year old has decorated it with puffy paints and—somewhat resembles a toilet. He doesn’t have to wonder long. Johnny picks it up between his thumb and forefinger and turns to him.

“Wondering what this is?”

Jack nods.

“This is a bubbler. Since you aren’t used to the throat-scorchingly transcendent essence of weed, then I’m afraid you’re going to need to use this. The water in the base makes it go down much smoother. It’s like using a potty-trainer—hell, it even looks like one.”

Well, that sounds like a challenge. For no rational reasons Jack feels like he’d be one-downing himself by smoking from that…thing—because then he’d be admitting that he can’t take it. And that’s a good way of losing respect…stupid male politics. That tobacco pipe looks much less…absurd. “You know I’ve smoked before. I can handle the tobacco pipe.”

“Ok. To each his own,” he says, in that nonchalant, you’re-the-author-of-your-own-suffering tone. “And since we’re breaking your cherry, you take the first hit.”

Johnny pinches off a dime-sized morsel from the larger body and stuffs it into the tobacco chamber.

Suddenly Jack realizes that he’s about to smoke a psychotropic substance whose effects he is completely unaware of, and maybe there was something to Johnny’s dire warnings about a trip to Hell and right now it’s taking all of his willpower not to piss himself—well, it’s too late to look back now, as Johnny is pressing the pipe and a rather large, silver zippo into Jack’s sweat-slick palms.

“You know how to do this, right?”

“Yeah. Of course.” Shouldn’t be too difficult. Light imposingly large zippo, ignite psychoactive herbs, inhale.

He clicks the wheel with his thumb—and a five-inch flame roars up inches from his eyes and he yelps, dropping it on the tiles.

“Fuck!” Johnny scoops up the lighter and blows out the still-burning flame.

Luckily, the floor’s tile, but the lighter has left an ugly black scar in the floor.

“Damn it, don’t be such a pussy. You’d better hope that Windex will get this out” 

“I didn’t—I wasn’t—Wh-what the fuck just happened?”

“I disabled the regulating ring—“

“The wha--?”

“Never mind. Try again. Don’t burn the house down.”

He gets up, walking toward (what Jack assumes is) the kitchen. Jack stares after his ass (covetously) as it shrinks into the distance. He’d give Johnny a rim-job if he’d ask. He told Michelle that there are places where the human mouth just wasn’t meant to go—but he’d go there for Johnny.

“Well, have you at least got another lighter?”

Johnny fishes a black, grocery-store lighter out of his pocket and tosses it to Jack. Ah, much more manageable.

He holds the pipe in his left hand, and ignites the lighter in his right. He turns the lighter ninety degrees, hovering the flame over the bowl. “Ouch! Fucking damn it!”

He stuffs his burnt fingertips in his mouth and floods them with saliva. It brings little relief.

“That bad?”

“What?”

“Must’ve been bad. You’re sucking your thumb.”

“Fuck off.” The statement seems to lose its sting, given that it’s muffled by the fingers in Jack’s mouth.

“Not tonight, darlin’.”

“Ha. Ha.”

“Need help with that?”

“I’m fine.”

Fingers ache-shaking, Jack lights the flame, dips the lighter toward the bowl, “Fuck!”

Johnny leans back, “I can watch you be macho about this all day.” Course sprigs of underarm hair fan themselves out as he stretches his arms back, lacing his fingers behind his head. Jack inhales his underarm musk, wanting.

Loathe as he is to have this done for him like an infant being fed mashed carrots, he hands Johnny the pipe and lighter.

Johnny holds the bowl, pointing the mouthpiece toward Jack. Jack briefly considers taking the whole stem into his mouth, then slowly withdrawing his lips until they tantalizingly brush against the tip. Then again, he doesn’t feel nearly sexy enough to pull that off. In fact, he rather feels like an unmitigated ass.

He puts his lips to the bit. His heart’s climbing stairs in his chest.

Johnny lights the zippo [with its flamboyantly large flame] and plunges it into the rim. The leaves quicken, smelling like, like…a sweet, musty brush fire in a locker room

“Now suck. Suck, bitch!” he commands, in a deep, demonic voice. 

Obediently, Jack sucks, hastily drawing in a lungful, embers airborne like confetti scorching at the tender lining of his throat like fire with claws and he tears away from the pipe and coughs and coughs and coughs raking the coals smoldering in his mouth and stripping the tattered rags of his throat and coughs and he feels them burning all the way down and it’s ridiculous but he’s coughing from the pit of his stomach.

He feels Johnny lightly plucking the pipe from his hands, “Hey, don’t leave the cherry burning like that.”

He lifts it to his lips and smoothly inhales, his thumb tapping the side of the bowl, where Jack notices a tiny hole has been drilled. He exhales, of course, in smoke rings. Jack wouldn’t be surprised if he could blow a smoke-dart through the bulls-eye of concentric smoke rings. [And he looks so…cool doing it. Relaxed and effortless and footage of this should never reach the eyes of young, impressionable minds, because if Jack was a fourteen year old kid and he saw it, he’d want to smoke cannabis too so that he could look cool like Johnny Depp. But no one’ll look as cool doing it as Johnny does. The trick is confidence. That’s why Johnny probably looks cool taking a shit, because he probably does it confidently. Not that Jack knows personally or anything.]

“This--*cough*--fucking--*cough*--hurts *cough* *cough* *cough*!”

Johnny’s unmoved. “So are you ready to try the bubbler then?”

“*cough* What? *cough* More?”

“Yeah man, you don’t just take one hit.” Another hit is low on the list of Jack’s things to do—somewhere below having a porcupine forcibly inserted into his anus. But he can’t quit now. *cough*

Jack nods. Talking’s such a fucking strain.

Johnny picks up the bubbler and fills the chamber at the base with some water from a half-empty Evian bottle. He packs the bowl and offers the bit to Jack.

“Hold it in this time, OK? And don’t suck it in all at once. Breathe it in slowly, and take it into your mouth before you inhale into your lungs.”

Jack nods, taking a tentative hit from the pipe. As he inhales, the water bubbles powerfully, sounding something like a fish tank filter and slurping the last dregs of soda from the bottom of the cup. And Jack’s loath to admit it, but it goes down much more smoothly—but his trachea’s still on fire from the first hit and it takes every ounce of his resolve not to cough but he feels like he’s got a flaming hedgehog in his throat bristling, burning his trachea.

Meanwhile, Johnny takes another languid hit from the tobacco pipe, looking somewhat like a professor—at Berkeley, Jack amends.

Twelve seconds pass and Jack coughs out the smoke and his throat’s probably rags by now.

“Keep coughing Jack, it gets you off harder.”

It does.

They repeat the process thrice more until the leaves are cashed, Johnny lighting for Jack and Jack struggling through each hit, but Jack realizes that it’s becoming steadily easier as the initial shock of the first begins to fade until, to Jack’s pleasure, he only feels a minty cool tingle at the back of his throat as air rushes against it. It feels wonderful, and Jack is certain that it’s making his breath fresher. He puckers his lips into an o-shape, and draws in air to further freshen his breath.

Johnny’s laughing. “What are you doing?”

“Freshening my breath. Marijuana’s something like sage, yeah? A bit minty.”

“Nah. It actually makes your breath kinda pungent. Come here.”

Johnny puts a hot hand on the back of Jack’s neck, making every hair on his body prickle like cactus needles, and kisses him. His lips are rough and more richly textured than Jack’s used to and they make his own lips buzz on the contact, and Jack’s tongue is sluggish and when he runs it along Johnny’s teeth it feels like he’s pushing piano keys, but Johnny’s breath is a little rank from the drugs, but in a wet grass soaked in sweet and sour sauce kind of way and he realizes with embarrassment that his mouth has been completely still for the past…several seconds.

“But my throat feels minty. Like I’ve just rinsed with mouth wash or something.”

“Well, I think that’s cuz you’re high.”

“Don’t be silly. I’m not…” Curiously, the cool marble tabletop feels wet under his fingertips.

Johnny’s smile is so broad, you’d think his face would crack. “Not what?”

“…Huh?”

“You were just saying that you’re not high.”

“I’m not…” maybe it is wet but thick like…mercury…looks like a bad animation …Jack’s hand’s moving like a bad animation…not enough frames per second…not high.

“I think you’re high.”

“’m not—“ Jack coughs, and suddenly his head deflates and slowly fills with…cough medicine. All floaty, and what was he just…can’t——where—what was I just—floating—can’t—stomach climbing echelons—can’t breathe—can’t—

“TOO HIGH! STOP! MAKE IT—STOP! I CAN’T BREATHE!”


	3. Chapter 3

  
Jack’s sucking air wide-mouthed gaping like a hooked fish flopping around a hot yacht deck. Inhaling volumes but not breathing a molecule of oxygen. Convulsively, he grabs his chest where his heart’s thumping madly ready to burst like a dirty bomb—  
  
“—CAN’T—BREATHE!”  
  
Falling off the couch, he’s shaking violent as if in the throes of a seizure.  
  
“CALL 911! We’ve got…FOUR MINUTES—!”  
  
‘Till what?” Johnny asks casual, snorting smoke out his nose like a dragon.  
  
“—WHAT—I CAN’T—MY BRAINCELLS—DIE—I CAN’T THINK! ICANTTHINK!”  
  
Johnny sighs behind him and Jack can’t see because his face is buried in the scratchy, course synthetic fibers of a throw rug.  
  
“It’s OK. You’re lucky that I’ve…that I’ve...” he lowers his voice to a breathless whisper. “I forgot why it’s OK.” He laughs, stoned-thoughtfully.  
  
“911—!” tempo crescendos every heartbeat’s a lightning clash—can’t breathe!  
  
“WHY’S IT OK?”  
  
“Huh? Oh. Yeah. Cuz I’ve got the…”  
  
“WHAT!?” curling into fetal position last moment judgments plunge into God’s scowling countenance drowning in amniotic fluid—  
  
“Cuz I’ve got the…the…” staring at the floor open-mouthed like a switched-off android.  
  
“FUCKING—DAMNIT! WHAT!?”  
  
“What’s your problem? Oh…the presence of mind to help you.” He starts fumbling for something.  
  
Jack starts crying. Fucking bawling and begging to die.  
  
“Hey—Look!”  
  
Jack turns his head, smearing a snail-trail of spit on the rug. It’s colors…It’s music…It’s…  
  
“THE FUCKING JETSONS!” Johnny announces, tossing the remote aside. “This show’s awesome. It’s soooo 50s—in a futuristic kinda way!”  
  
 ** _MEET GEORGE JETSON_**  
  
“Oh my God!” he exclaims to the carpet. A rush through space is there wind in your hair if your ride light and general relativity—relat… _related to what?_  
  
“Yeah—so demanding. Whaddif I dun wanna meet George Jetson? Whaddif I think he’s an asshole! You sayin’ I got no choice? That’s post-war 50s fascism, man.” Johnny muses.  
  
 ** _JANE, HIS WIFE_**  
  
“Man…is that her whole identity?...an extension of her husband…sexists, man, sexists.”  
  
Jack’s content to lie on the ground, gritting his teeth against the ebb and flow of panic in his belly. Stem the tide—stem? Tides don’t have stems, they’re…gravitational effects of the moon…which has no stem…but if it did it’d look just like a trampled dandelion—half-wish indecision—Johnny…  
  
“* _BEEPBEEPWHIRP_ *”  
  
“What the fuuuck!?” The fuck!...The fucking robot just rolled in and freaked out and—  
  
“* _BEEPBEEPWHIRP_ *”  
  
“Oh my God!” And Jack laughs, no, giggles. A chest-rending, clutching his stomach so his guts don’t burst out his sides—  
  
“* _BEEPBEEPWHIRP_ *  
  
“What’s so funny?”  
  
But he can’t stop laughing and it’s not mind-funny, it’s convulsively gut-funny.  
  
“* _BEEPBEEPWHIRP_ *  
  
Not—funny. Like being tied-up and tickled. Stomach cramped, chest aching, can’t—  
  
“CAN’T BREATH!”  
  
“Jesus, not again.” Johnny’s miffed.  
  
Jack’s sobbing hot, red-faced tears through the racking giggles that won’t stop—won’t—  
  
“* _BEEPBEEPWHIRP_ *  
  
“Ouch!—TURN IT OFF! Please—Johnny! TURNITOFF!”  
  
Unhurried, Johnny picks up the remote and turns off the TV.  
  
Lacking stimulus, the giggles ebb—and the paranoia returns.  
  
Feelings, those cling to him, like he’s clamped in the jaws of a big, black dog shaking him but thoughts, something to rationalize away the demons—that’s like scooping up water in your hands and trying to hold it—you can’t—it leaks away—  
  
“I DON’T WANT TO BE HIGH ANYMORE! I CAN’T—I CAN’T--!”  
  
“Breathe?” Johnny supplies, not bothering to mask his irritation. “You’ve gotta be the worst buzz-kill I’ve ever seen.”  
  
Jack’s languishing, turning violent shades of red as he hyperventilates.  
  
“All right. If cartoons can’t distract you from yourself—“ Johnny considers.  
  
“You hungry, Jack? You hungry?”  
  
Hungry?—For? What’s hun—Pit in belly chocolate biscuits—what’s a choc…?—Hungry.  
  
“Yeah. Yeah.” Desperate. Like a crackhead, cracked-open drained of body high.  
  
“Good. That’s good. We’re finally making some progress here. How does a pizza sound?”  
  
Jack nods, still on the floor, curled up in an aborted fetal position.  
  
Johnny whips out his cell phone and begins scanning the contacts.  
  
“No!” Jack bolts up and crawls to Johnny’s knees like an old, broken dog, “Don’t!...Don’t!” He begs near sobbing.  
  
“This is the only way to get your pizza, cuz I’m not making one. It’d be perilous for me to deal with an oven right now.” He continues scanning. “There we go, Pizza Hut. You like stuffed crust, Jack?”  
  
Tears stream down his face and his head’s aching from the blind panic coupled with the hard, belly sobs.  
  
“Please Johnny! Don’t—“ he makes a slow-motion grab for the cell phone, which Johnny easily swats away.  
  
“Why not?”  
  
“Because,” he lowers his voice, the neighbors might be able to hear through the walls because stucco doesn’t contribute to the sound-proofing. No, not at all. “They’ll know.”  
  
“What are you going on about?”  
  
“They’ll know we’re high. And…call the police—Prison—ANAL RAPE!”  
  
“We’ll be fine, man. If Pizza Hut ratted out all their stoner customers, they’d go outta business.”   
  
Jack throws himself onto Johnny’s legs, hugging his knees and blubbering like a baby, “Please! Don’t!—our eyes are bloodshot and we smell like cannabis and he’ll know and it’ll be in the press and I won’t have a career!”  
  
Johnny absently strokes Jack’s hair as if he’s calming a skittish dog. “Shh, shh. You’re not gonna ruin your career. Ozzy Osbourne has lived off of heroin and lighter fluid for three decades. Y’think anyone cares?”  
  
“N…what?”   
  
“Good. You’ve forgotten?”  
  
“Forgotten? Wh—what were we talking…I CAN’T REMEMBER! I CA—I CAN’T LIVE LIKE THIS!”  
  
Johnny rubs Jack’s head more vigorously and it doesn’t feel like hair it feels like there’s a silk shroud on his bare scalp and Johnny’s just manipulating it—deliciously. He nuzzles the hand.  
  
“Mmm…I’ve got no hair.”  
  
The hand pauses.  
  
“What?”  
  
“It feels like…like a…”  
  
“Shh. Close your eyes and sit still. It’ll take you away.” Jack nods, the adrenaline still floating in his system buzzing electric eels in his veins.  
  
His eyes flutter shut—and his head feels like a bubble being siphoned away from the crown like…like a vacuum hose sucking sucking sucking him away. His head tilts left, then rolls right as his brain swishes around like half-melted ice cream sliding around the base of a bowl…ice cream….  
  
His eyes crack open, “Ice cream,” he whispers, seemingly unable to imbue his words with much more than breath.  
  
“Hey, that’s not a bad idea.” Johnny’s cheeks are tinged pink matching his eyes perfectly. He stands up. Jack can’t help but to whine at the loss of contact—and the loss of distraction… _Where’s Johnny_? He’d only looked away for a second but he’s…where?...His stomach begins to tighten as the panic attack snowballs around in his guts—He throws himself on the floor, groping the carpet whose fibers actually feel—decidedly un-carpet fiber-ey…like a membrane stretched over gelatin and it seems like his whole body has sunk slightly into the gelatin puddle and he keeps rubbing, experimentally feeling fingers plunge into the gelatinous, fibrous depths…  
  
“What’re you doing?” Johnny’s carrying a Costco-sized tub of Neapolitan ice cream.  
  
“The carpet—it’s…tactile.”  
  
“Man, you’re trippin’.”  
  
“Am not.” Is he? What is he—don’t—CAN’T—  
  
Suddenly, a golf-ball sized chunk of chocolate ice-cream is shoved into his mouth.  
  
“Oh my god.” He rolls it around his mouth, feeling it melt on his tongue and cold tingle his teeth and Johnny’s laughing now.  
  
“What?” he sputters, forgetting that his mouth is still full of chocolate ice cream soup. Spews a few flecks that fly onto Johnny’s jeans and dribbles down Jack’s chin. He wipes it away with his sleeve, then sets to wiping off Johnny, but his efforts only seem to be spreading the stain.  
  
Johnny seems unaffected. “You got the munchies, Jack?”  
  
“Huh? What’s the…”  
  
Johnny laughs again, “Here. Come to the kitchen. I’ll show ya.”  
  
He follows Johnny to the kitchen. Johnny opens a cupboard and dear lord it’s like a dream. A diabetic’s dream! Twinkies, Ho hos, Ding Dongs, chocolates, Doritos, biscuits, Wildberry Pop Tarts—  
  
“What’s wildberry? ‘sthat native to South America”  
  
“Nah. Wildberry’s just code for fruit paste and a bag of sugar. You should try some!”  
  
He extracts a foil package. “But first, we’re going to have to turn the toaster on  _high_?”  
  
Jack laughs and laughs and laughs and…  
  
“It wasn’t  _that_  funny.”  
  
Momentarily, Jack holds back the giggles, but his eye catches the toaster dial that reads HIGH and busts up laughing again.  
  
“It’s like it knows.”  
  
*ding* The Pop Tart shoots up.  
  
“Oh my god!” Startled, he leaps back.  
  
“Don’t you ever relax? Jeez.”  
  
“Uh…”  
  
“Don’t answer that.”  
  
“OK.” Johnny offers the Pop Tart, which Jack accepts gratefully. He takes a large bite and  _oh my God_  he feels the subtle differentiation between biting through the frosting and the breading and mastication never felt this good. He rolls the half-chewed pop tart around his mouth, making sure that every crevice experiences the nerve-tickling tingles of the pop tart’s rich texture. When you’re high, you don’t  _eat_  food…you experience it.  
  
“You gonna swallow that?”  
  
Jack swallows, and immediately bites off another substantial chunk, repeating the process until the Pop Tart has been thoroughly debauched inside his grinding maw.  
  
“More.”  
  
They spend, uhhhh…a long time in the kitchen. Jack feeling out the pleasurable nuances of each snack until at some point he realizes that he’s leaning face-forward against the refrigerator tonguing a matted bit of something stuck in his teeth—with mind-numbing satisfaction.  
  
Johnny’s sitting on the counter, legs dangling down the polished, plastic front of the dish washer and working on a fudgesicle.  
  
Jack suddenly feels a sympathetic connection to that fudgesicle—nay, an extrasensory link that reaches beyond mere pathos! Every lick Johnny takes from that fudgesicle resonates harmoniously on his cock.  
  
Slowly, Jack turns so that his back’s flat against the refrigerator humming against his backside.  
  
“Don’t stop!”  
  
Johnny withdraws the fudgesicle from his mouth. “Don’t stop what?”  
  
“Ahh! You stopped!”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Licking the fudgesicle. I…er…sympathetic connection.”  
  
“Huh?” Johnny takes another lick, and the warmth slides up Jack’s shaft firm and warm and painfully ball-constricting. Jack moans, grabbing himself. “Oh, I get it. Your dick and the fudgesicle have some kinda psychic link going on.”  
  
Jack nods like a mad-man. “Yes!—Exactly!” His cock’s screaming for something tactile.  
  
Mercifully, Johnny plunges his mouth down he fudgesicle to the very Popsicle stick and slowly draws his lips back to the top. His tongue swirls around the tip before he dives down again, working that fudgesicle hard and Jack can’t see it, but he feels Johnny’s tongue twisting around the shaft, swirling like a fucking cyclone sucking sucking sucking until Jack’s ridden up the trough, to the crest, poised, ready to—  
  
The fudgesicle breaks in the middle and Jack falls onto the fucking floor. “Ack!”  
  
Johhny laughs, sliding the cold lump of chocolate around his mouth until it’s sufficiently melted to bite into.  
  
“You fucking bit it!” Jack accuses, still prostrate on the floor.  
  
“Dude, no. It broke. You can’t give head to a fucking fedgesicle. It started melting, and it got too thin to take the pressure.”  
  
“YOU’RE A FUCKING LIAR! You…BASTARD!”  
  
“Can’t come up with anything better?”  
  
“NO!...I’m too fucking high,” he says mournfully.  
  
Johnny shrugs his shoulders, “I’m going back to the living room. Come back when you’ve mellowed out.”  
  
“Like I’d come back to a fucking sadist like you!”  
  
But Johnny’s already walked out and Jack feels the most alone that he’s ever felt in his life…and confused…and how did he—CAN’T BR—FUCK!  
  
He scrambles to his feet and heads to the living room—no, that’s the dining room—where the fu...other way…  
  
Miraculously, he finds his way back, but the exertion has done nothing to stunt the panic swelling in his chest.  
  
He throws himself against the wall, running his fingers against the stucco begging the panic to just go away but so long as he’s thinking about not panicking he remembers he’s panicking and you can’t make yourself forget!  
  
“What are you doing?” He hears Johnny ask, disinterestedly. He probably is just wondering why Jack’s getting his chocolate-covered fingerprints all over his California, white-washed walls.  
  
“I’m mountain climbing!”  
  
Johnny returns his attention to his computer, though it never truly left. And music—an electronica song. The music makes Jack’s head pulse in time with the rhythm and each note swells like a swallow of honey in his throat. The tempo crescendos, the bass goes wild and all of a sudden his throat’s so clogged with music that air can’t seem to pass through.  
  
“I CAN’T BREATHE!”  
  
Johnny just stares at the LCD screen, clicking indifferently through his music library.  
  
“JOHNNY! I’M GOING TO DIE! DON’T YOU CARE THAT I’M GOING TO DIE!?” He’s crawled to Johnny’s legs again. He tries to touch him, but Johnny shrugs him off.  
  
“LOOK! I’M SORRY I’M SORRY IMSORRY! PLEASE, PLEASE HELP ME!”  
  
“Hey, I don’t care about what happened in the kitchen, but I’m not going to help you out of another bad trip. You’re making them for yourself, so you’re going to get yourself out. I’m not a fucking babysitter.”  
  
Jack chokes back a surge of tears. For a moment he’s too hurt to panic…for a moment. Then it comes back ten-fold and it’s like “A Perfect Storm” where they’re in a dinky, rickety little fishing boat and a mighty edifice of a swell rears up big as the Empire State Building—  
  
An idea strikes him. Fighting the current of his own terror, he pulls the orange bottle of Xanax out of his pants pocket. It takes twenty minutes orally but he can—He drops two pills on the table and tries ineffectually to crush them under his fist, but his cell phone’s hard enough to do the job, so he grinds them to powder under it and gathers it into a mound. He launches himself onto the blue powder pile (looks like pixie stix), plugs one nostril with his thumb and snorts as much as he can in one drag—and it feels like a wildfire’s burning between his nose and his tear-duct.  
  
He collapses against the couch, waiting with eyes clenched shut for the burning to fade. After forever, (though according to the grandfather clock was only three minutes) the panic is purged from his body clean and effectively as flushing a toilet.  
  
He crawls back to Johnny. “All better,” he announces, penitently but cautiously optimistic. Johnny douses his cheerfulness.  
  
“Yep. You are,” not looking away from the monitor. Jack senses a note of disappointment in Johnny’s voice.  
  
“What—what did I do wrong? You told me to make myself better and I did.”  
  
“ _You_  didn’t make yourself better, man, a sedative did. Drugs aren’t going to solve your problems.”  
  
“They solved this one.” Jack offers, and immediately realizes it was not the correct thing to say.  
  
Johnny shrugs, selecting a new song. A terrible metal song that makes Jack cover his ears and hum to keep out the invading cacophony.  
  
“What the hell is this rubbish?”  
  
“Gay for Johnny Depp.”  
  
“You taking the piss?”  
  
“No man. That’s  _really_  their name.”  
  
“Oh. What else you got?”  
  
“Well, let’s see. I’ve got Grand Mother Fucker?”  
  
“What the fuuuuck?” Jack giggles.  
  
“And Inhale Mary…Lesbian Dopeheads on Mopeds….Oedipussy…Sucking Diction. Oh, and my favorite, Barabara’s Bush.”  
  
Jack’s giggles have broken off. Johnny looks down, and realizes that he’s staring wide-eyed fascinated directly at the screen.  
  
“You trippin’ on the visualizer?”  
  
Jack nods, his mouth pops open. An electric blue, squiggly bubble swells in time with the music, and lighting lines trace unknown patterns across the screen. “It’s so…”  
  
“Tripulous?” Johnny supplies.  
  
“Yeah…That.”  
  
After about a half-hour, Jack re-discovers that the high is enhanced when he closes his eyes. The moment they shut, the floor of reality drops out from under him and space is fluid. He feels like there’s a magnet directly in front of him drawing him to it and he rocks forward. Amazing.  
  
He lies down, and lets the closed-eye visions come to him like mad, whimsical revelations. With an effort, reaches up and tugs on Johnny’s sleeve. “Hey Johnny, it’s so much better when you close your eyes.”  
  
“Yep. I know,” he answers, sounding like he knows something that Jack’s about to discover. He hopes it’s as interesting as the feeling of sinking through the floor like quick-sand.  
  
A memory flits before the apparitions. His purpose. His drive. His whole motivation for putting himself through this purgatory.  
  
He tugs on Johnny’s sleeve again, like a child trying to capture his mother’s attention. “I love you Johnny.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
The visions close-in in a dense tangle, like he’s weightless in a sky filled with warm jello.  
  
[+]  
  
“Hey, wake up.”  
  
Johnny’s shaking his shoulders. “It’s almost eleven. You’ve got to get going. You sober?”  
  
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m sober.” He says, perhaps a little too early to evaluate.  
  
“Good.” Johnny helps him up. He hands him his keys and powder-sprinkled cell phone.  
  
“See you tomorrow.”  
  
He ushers Jack out the door with disorienting haste and closes it quickly behind him.  
  
“Now where the fuck is my car?” Jack mutters aloud.  
  
After searching up and down the block for a quarter of an hour, he remembers that he’s parked two blocks away. Johnny had insisted.  
  
He climbs behind the wheel of his behemoth Escalade and suddenly realizes that he is definitely  _not_  sober.  
  
Then he remembers his university friend’s words, “Cannabis is like alcohol, except you can drive.”  
  
He takes a deep, sobering breath and thrusts the keys into the ignition.  
  
[+]  
  
Jack pops another Vicodin, dry-swallowing. The doctor said no more than one every four hours. Well, he missed one this morning, so spread over the twenty-four hour day, that shouldn’t be more than one every four hours. Actually with the two at lunch….fuck it!  _This bloody hurts!_  Each one of the twelve sutures in his arm seems to be screaming falsetto.  
  
“So, how did you get out of a DUI?” Gore asks, intrigued.  
  
“Well, I was lucky enough to crash into my own garage door. Since I was on my own property and not on a public street, the said they didn’t have jurisdiction.”  
  
“No shit?”  
  
“Shit.”  
  
“Thanks man. I’ll remember that.”  
  
“No problem.” A walkie-talkie crackles in his breast pocket. “Yeah?” The voice on the other end blares unrecognizably. “I’m on it.”  
  
“Sorry man, I gotta get going.”  
  
“No problem.”  
  
Ever since the accident, Jack’s received a heavy outpouring of sympathy from everyone, from Jerry himself to Alejandro the grip. Jack’s kept his distance from Johnny, though. Thankfully, they haven’t had a scene together in the week since the accident, so avoiding Johnny hasn’t been difficult. Not that Johnny’s really looking for him…  
  
It took a bad-trip into stark madness (one which still gives Jack nightmares) and a car accident, but Jack’s finally willing to accept that maybe Johnny’s always going to be locked-up. Maybe he’s not a safe after all. The correct combination isn’t going to crack this guy. Johnny doesn’t even have a lock. That would mean that he’s intended for someone to open.  
  
No, Johnny’s just a block of steel-reinforced concrete pushed overboard into the bottom of the fucking ocean and no one—NO ONE—is ever going to see what’s buried in his core. Maybe there’s nothing. Just a solid block of fucking concrete that makes you so goddamn certain that he’s hiding something magnificent…if you could just chip away…  
  
[+]  
  
Three quick raps on the trailer door.  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“Hey, it’s me.”  
  
It’s Johnny.  _Shit_.  
  
“ _Co_ me in.” Voice cracks. God, he sounds nervous.  
  
The moment Johnny opens the door, Jack stammers, “I’m s-so sorry. I thought—I thought I was sober. I didn’t mean to—What I meant—I’m sorry for what I said to you.”  
  
“Don’t worry about it, man. All’s forgotten.” He takes a seat beside Jack, “I just wanted to see how you’re doing?”  
  
Jack peels back his sleeve, revealing the monstrous laceration running from his elbow to his wrist.  
  
“Wow. That’s a good one. Where’d you cut it?”  
  
“Haven’t the foggiest. I just crawled out of the car, fell onto the pavement, and realized that my arm was bleeding.”  
  
“Oh, man. I’m so sorry.” Johnny sits beside Jack, takes the injured arm in his hands, and lays down a line of kisses running parallel to the stitches. Jack melts. “I’ve got to get back now, but if you need anything just ask. I’ll make you some chicken soup or something.”  
  
Johnny leaves, sucking the all air out of the trailer with him. When the door smacks shut, Jack jumps up with a marvelous idea. He’s found the combination! Why hadn’t he thought of it before!?  
  
He looks at his half-healed injury and frowns. The stitches are due to come out on Thursday… _Oh, but Doctor, the car door caught it and cut it back open._    
  
Jack re-settles on his chair and methodically scratches off the soft, red beginnings of scabs, pondering in what inflection Johnny would say, “I love you.”


End file.
